Diary of a writing, reading, animal loving, travelling Penguin and his mate who love collecting Penguin books, taking photographs and talking to people about Tasmania, Australia

Tuesday, 23 December 2014

It's Penguin Challenge Day 23

This month is moving along fast. Too fast. The Penguin discussion today is around the Best Present.
I think this is a hard one.

Giving presents to others is a lot of fun. Donating to our favourite wildlife sanctuary is also probably the best thing we can do. Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary is raising money to build a wildlife hospital. It will be staffed with a specialist wildlife veterinarian. I am an FOC at Bonorong. That stands for Friends of Carers. Whenever anyone finds injured and sick wildlife they ring Bonorong.

Tawny Frogmouths (a nightjar bird)

Bonorong staff then send out text messages to people who have been trained by them to collect the animals and transport them either to carers (for joeys and birds for example) or veterinarians who volunteer to take care of the animals. Usually road injuries. So far they have trained over 1000 rescue volunteers.

They expect to make over 6000 call outs this calendar year. That is an amazing number. The numbers will remain high because people don't care enough to slow down at night to watch out for our nocturnal native animals.

A Tasmanian Devil j

Also when wallabies are on the run at night it is
impossible to stop in time when driving. They
are very fast. The same goes for possums. There are environmental issues that affect animals. Like toxoplasmosis in our wildlife population, a neurological disease caused by feral cats. The birds are also subject to disease in the wild.

Meet Fred. He just had his 100th birthday.He had a party and got a letter from the Queen.

Today I was called out to collect a green rosella that had flown into a window and concussed itself and to pick up a young cockatoo that had a beak and feather disease it had picked up. Neither animal survived but at least they did not suffer a
painful death in the wild.

I think donating money to Bonorong instead of buying a lot of presents nobody needs is a wonderful and satisfying thing to do.

As for receiving a great present we received today a wonderful gift certificate from Amazon from my brother's family. We can buy books with it. Enough books to load up the kindle or get that reference book that is calling. I love presents like this. What will we use it for? I guess you'll have to wait and see as we go through the year and yet another must have book will surface into our realm of awareness.

A wombat joey who was orphaned.

What is something that you have given or received for Christmas that makes you happy?